🎉 September release: Breakout rooms, more reactions, daily briefs, and more

Our team just returned from one of our full-company offsites, this time in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I’m still energized by the week we had together!

As the company scales to 300 people this year (!), I’m extremely grateful for the journey we’ve had.

All anyone at Circle cares about is helping you build great businesses that endure and transform lives. We’re immensely grateful to you for choosing Circle, and for giving us the chance to make an impact on your business.

Now, on to the update…

This month, I’m excited to share that we are shipping three of our most requested features of all time: breakout rooms, reactions on posts/comments/messages, and custom gamification rewards with point resets. Yes, they’re all finally here!

Breakout rooms

You can now split any live event into up to 10 breakout rooms for small-group discussion, practice, or networking, then bring everyone back to the main room in one click.

Every breakout room is a full live room, with the same video quality, chat, Q&A, and spotlight as your main session.

This means you can now:

• Teach a lesson, then send members into small groups to practice it together
• Split a large cohort into smaller coaching or accountability circles
• Turn a big event into focused, small-group networking
• Give members room to collaborate before sharing back with everyone

As the host, you can create up to 10 rooms, assign members to them or leave them open, and optionally set a timer. You can also let members move between breakout rooms themselves. When you're ready, bring everyone back to the main room and keep the event going.

A few things to know: host setup is desktop-only for now, though members can join from desktop or mobile. Breakout Rooms only work in live rooms, not live streams. Hosts can't reassign members between rooms once a session has started, and chat from the main room doesn't carry into breakout rooms.

Gradual rollout starting early next week, with availability for all customers in early October.

To learn more about breakout rooms, check out our guide here.

Reactions across posts, comments, DMs, & chat spaces

Last month, we brought expanded emoji reactions to live events. This month, we're bringing more ways to react to posts, comments, DMs, and chat spaces.

Post & comment reactions 👍🎉💜

On any post or comment, we’ve now added 6 ways to react beyond just a simple Like. You can now react with a Like, Celebrate, Support, Love, Insightful, and Funny. More reaction types means more room for personality and a lightweight way to weigh in on an idea.

You can also see a breakdown of the reactions a post or comment receives, giving you a richer read on how your members respond. You can even use reactions for a quick informal poll.

To learn more about post and comment reactions, check out our guide here.

DM & chat space reactions 😊

DMs and chat spaces now get the full emoji picker, so members can respond with the emoji that fits instead of choosing from a fixed set.

A reaction is often faster than a reply. Members can acknowledge a message, celebrate a win, or weigh in without adding another message to the conversation.

This completes our rollout of expanded reactions across Circle.

Post & comment reactions: Rolling out starting next week across desktop and mobile.

DM & chat space reactions: Available free today to all customers across desktop and mobile.

Custom gamification rewards

We’re adding two of your most-requested improvements to gamification: custom rewards and point resets.

Custom rewards

You can now award points to any member directly from their profile, without needing to create a Workflow.

Workflows can still reward members automatically for repeatable actions, like publishing a post or completing a lesson. Now, you also have a simple way to reward one-off moments that don’t fit into an automation.

Give someone extra points for a standout contribution, winning a challenge, helping another member, or anything else worth recognizing on the spot.

Open a member's profile, go to the Gamification tab, and select Reward points. Enter the number of points and an optional reason, and the reward is immediately added to their history, points total, and level.

To learn more about custom rewards, check out our guide here.

Reset points

You can also reset gamification points when it's time for a fresh start.

Kick off a new monthly challenge, run a seasonal competition, or give newer members a fresh shot at the leaderboard without competing against years of accumulated points.

Rolling out now, with availability for all customers by early next week.

To learn more about resetting gamification points, see Manage gamification settings.

Daily briefs

Circle AI can now help you stay on top of your business with a personalized daily brief.

While you’re running your business, Circle AI is keeping track of what’s happening and looking for what deserves your attention.

Each brief gives you a quick overview of what’s happening, three important signals, and three recommended actions.

These aren’t generic recommendations. Circle AI already knows your business, your goals, and what you’ve been working on together. It combines that context with Circle’s best practices to identify the opportunities that can have the biggest impact on your business and recommend what to do next.

Click any recommendation and Circle AI brings that context into a conversation, so you can dig into the opportunity, decide how to approach it, and start working on it together.

And because Circle AI has memory, your briefs get more useful over time as it learns more about your business and what you’re working toward.

You can also get your brief by email, with a link back into Circle AI when there’s something you want to work on. Choose daily or weekly updates, or turn them off from your Notification settings.

Rolling out starting this week, with availability for all customers by early next week.

PSA: Circle Eclipse will be automatically enabled for everyone on October 1

Back in July, we launched Circle Eclipse and made it possible for anyone to activate Eclipse for your community.

On October 1, Circle Eclipse will become the default experience for all customers. If you haven’t activated it yet, your community will automatically make the switch.

Most of the changes are on the admin side, with a more polished and streamlined experience for running your business: simpler navigation and settings, a unified Inbox, and Circle AI built directly into the platform. For members, the experience stays largely the same, with the biggest change being our highly requested redesign of Courses.

Circle has become a powerful platform with a lot you can build and do. With Circle AI, our goal isn’t to give you another AI tool. It’s to make all of Circle easier to use. Instead of learning every setting or digging through help docs, you can describe what you want to accomplish and Circle AI can help you get there.

And AI remains completely optional. You can continue using Circle without it, and your business data and Circle AI conversations are never used to train Circle’s or third-party AI models.

We’ve put a tremendous amount of care into this new experience. We hope Circle feels more polished, easier to navigate, and easier than ever to build your business with.

Other updates

• Improved Paywalls analytics. Get a clearer picture of your business with redesigned revenue analytics, including gross and net revenue, refunds, subscription growth, and deeper trial reporting. We’ve also improved MRR and ARR accuracy across plan changes, coupons, refunds, currencies, and more.
• Coupon visibility and filtering for subscriptions. See which coupon a member used directly from your Subscriptions dashboard, and filter by coupon to understand which promotions are driving purchases. Coupon data is also queryable through Circle AI.
• New Events tab. View and manage every event across your community from one place. Filter by event name, host, or space, then quickly open, duplicate, share, bookmark, or delete an event.
• Redesigned Notifications tab. Notifications now live within Circle Inbox, organized into tabs (Inbox, Content, Mentions, Following, Moderation, All) with Unread and Archived filters.
• A better mobile experience for live events. We’ve redesigned live rooms and live streams on mobile, making it easier to watch, chat, and ask questions at the same time.
• Simpler sign-in with one-time passcodes. A new email-first experience makes it easier for members to sign up or sign in, with passwordless authentication available by default when a password isn’t set and helpful reminders showing which social or SSO option they used last.
• Branded app improvements. Members with paid subscriptions can now access billing from their user menu, making it easier to manage their membership on the go. We’re also bringing the Member Map to branded apps, so members can discover and connect with people near them from mobile.
• Reusable blocks with Circle AI Page Builder. Circle AI can now create and reuse common page sections like headers and footers, so you can build them once and use them across your website instead of starting from scratch each time.
• More capabilities for the Admin API and Circle MCP. Manage more of Circle programmatically, including members and contacts, invitation links, workflows, profile fields, audience filters, and more. These capabilities also extend to Circle MCP, making it easier to work with Circle from external tools without relying on CSV exports.

iOS improvements

We also shipped a few improvements toCircle’s iOS app:

• Creating events is now a smoother experience with improved attendee controls and support for inviting members directly.
• Chat reactions now support the full emoji set, giving your members more ways to respond and engage.
• We made it easier to search member-tags
• Advanced search can now surface image posts
• Improved UX, performance, and reliability.

Android improvements

And some improvements onCircle’s Android andCircle Plus branded apps:

• Users can now record and attach videos directly when creating comments.
• Chat reactions now support the full emoji set, giving your members more ways to respond and engage.
• Members can be invited directly from the event creation page without navigating away.
• Quickly jump to the first unread message or scroll to the latest message in chat.
• Improved UX, performance, and reliability.

📆 What’s new in Circle is back!

Every month, Rob Hand takes us behind the scenes of the latest Circle releases, shows you how they work, and answers your questions live.

And September is a big one. We’ve released three of the most requested updates ever. 👀

Join us on September 29 at 11:30 am ET to get a closer look at:

✨ Breakout rooms to turn bigger events into smaller, more meaningful conversations
😊 New emoji reactions to give members more ways to express themselves
🏆 Gamification updates with custom rewards and point resets
🤖 Circle AI daily briefs to help you stay on top of what needs your attention

Come ready to put these into action, Rob will show you how to use them in your own business.

And if you joined us last month, we’d love to hear what you’ve tried since!

RSVP now